As Rishi Sunak arrives in Washington DC for his first official visit to the USA as UK Prime Minister there can be little doubt that events in Ukraine will fill most of the agenda. Feint hopes then that the PM might also have been able to achieve the long hoped for trade deal with the US and which to all intents and purposes, has now moved onto the back burner where I guess the subject will remain throughout the remaining period of President Biden’s first and maybe only term, in office.
Week by week and sometimes day by day, those charged with observing how the UK handles defence see nothing but more cuts. Following on from the so-called Integrated Review Refresh we await the pleasure of reading more detail in respect of further cuts to manpower and equipment capability in the Defence Command Paper which should be published before the end of this month.
I have been around far too long to hold out any hope that this or any other future UK government – Labour or Tory – will get let alone respond to the message that UK defence capability and capacity is now so stretched that the cupboard is all but bare. How could we have allowed this to happen?
Perhaps the best thing that President Biden could do now in order to get the message across of how concerned our US allies are now in regard of the parlous state of the UK military and defence capability and our ability to deploy on more than say one front that in his White House talks with Rishi Sunak tomorrow he should bang the drum hard and say that without signs of genuine and visible expansion in UK defence capability there can and will be no trade deal between the US and UK on offer!
Last week in a very typical and underhand way we learned that yet another Type 23 Frigate, frigate, HMS Westminster, would not now continue through a planned refit period and that she is now more than likely to be decommissioned and scrapped. If so, the UK would be down to just 10 frigates in the Royal Navy – until the first of the Type 26 and Type 31 frigates come into service a few years from now.
Until the latter ships start to be commissioned into Royal Navy service, let us not forget that the venerable yet still superb Type 23 frigates are and will remain the backbone of the Royal Navy fleet. Yes, obsolescence can and is a problem leading to refits taking longer as the ships get older. The recent five-year long refit of HMS Iron Duke is an example of that as of course was the refuelling of HMS Vanguard.
It is now just short of two months since Type 23 frigate HMS Montrose was decommissioned at HM Naval Base, Portsmouth. HMS Monmouth had already gone.
Such is the lie that is defence in the UK today that I was angered once again when I recently re-read the written evidence given by the now Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee given back in November 2021 in regard of the £100 million cost that might be saved by retiring two Type 23 frigates much earlier than originally planned and his telling the Committee:
“There is clearly a relationship between the number of ships in the Royal Navy and how many days of availability for operations we can deliver. That relationship is, however, a complex one, driven by how much resource, in both people and money, is available to crew and support those ships and how much time they must spend in deep maintenance.”
Preening his feathers, no doubt, the Admiral believed that by scrapping older Type 23’s early and extending the life of HMS Argyll, Lancaster and Iron Duke following planned refits, that they will now get 135 months of Type 23 availability – apparently a 55% increase over the pre-Integrated Review plan. What planet is he on I wonder!
The current appalling situation of capability and capacity limitations is not that different within the Royal Air Force. The training situation leaves much to be desired but please don’t blame the industry partners, blame the manner in which the RAF handled OCU (Operational Conversion Unit) training along with other issues which I won’t go into here again.
And with our having now completed the last C-130J mission in order that, as opposed to putting strategic capability requirement first, the MOD can dispose of this fine capability to third parties in order to raise money – that probably sums up the attitude and approach of politicians and some of those working in the MOD and Treasury today.
I won’t bore you with all the other RAF capability lost and not replaced as I have written on this subject matter many times before. As to the Army, I’ll save that for another day.
The point though is that almost every day we see further examples of penny pinching in UK defence. Lacking motivation and incentive and lacking the strength of leadership that they crave; we see morale of our armed forces now at almost an all-time low.
Does our Government really care? Not a bit. Is the British public sufficiently well informed to know just how weak our defence capability currently is? No – we live in the same old pretence that all is well and that we have sufficient capability for whatever might be required.
Does our Government and indeed, the Opposition Labour Party have any idea of our overall weakness in defence? Do they understand what our European NATO allies are doing and what we are not – spending and modernising defence capability as fast as they can?
Do they have any idea of what our US allies really think of us and of how concerned they are at our defence capability weaknesses and the seeming race to the bottom? No, they prefer to keep kidding themselves that all will be well!
It would of course be wrong of me to say that since I wrote ‘No Holiday From History’ twelve years ago that nothing has changed. Yes, overall, we do have more modern equipment capability than we did back then. But in terms of available capacity we have but a shadow of what we had back then and we have arguably reached a point that when it comes to our ability to defend ourselves, to play our full part in Nato with our allies, we have never been weaker than we are today. Thank heavens we still have the nuclear deterrent capability and that we are renewing it.
Of course, the counter argument is that we are a small nation that has lost the empire it once had and that can no longer afford to have a place at the international table. Heaven forbid the day that we see that but given our attitude to defence of the realm, given how we appear to no longer have neither a workable or affordable Foreign Office strategy and policy, given that we continue to live beyond our means and think that we are a cut above the rest and that we ride the pretence that the rest of the world still looks up to us, little is about to change.
Defence they say is a political choice. It certainly is – until the enemy is at the back door. Our would-be enemies are increasingly apparent and they will be observing our weaknesses compared to their growing strengths.
It is never too late to change of course, but there must always be the combination of will to succeed and leadership to match.
The above is indexed as UK Defence (413)
To Be Continued……
CHW (London – 7th June 2023)
Howard Wheeldon FRAeS
Wheeldon Strategic Advisory Ltd,
M: +44 7710 779785
Skype: chwheeldon
@AirSeaRescue